Sure, Jacki Weaver thinks about retirement. But there’s too much to do

Jacki Weaver’s love for Los Angeles, where she has lived since the 2010 hit film Animal Kingdom gave her an unexpected Hollywood career, was tested by the devastating fires that started just an hour before she returned from Australia earlier this year.

“As the plane came in to land, there was billowing smoke because from LAX you can see the Palisades,” the 77-year-old actor says. “I live in West Hollywood and it just got worse and worse.

“The next day, Runyon Canyon in the Hollywood Hills caught fire so we got an evacuation warning. We were all ready to go with the dog, but I think around 2 o’clock they brought them under control. It was pretty frightening.”

Like everyone in LA, Weaver and her actor husband Sean Taylor were shaken by the fires that killed 29 people and destroyed thousands of homes and businesses. Knowing people who had lost their houses, they offered support and went to fundraising events.

Jacki Weaver, now 77, starred in some of the major Australian films of the 1970s before her Hollywood breakthrough. Credit: SBS

“Things have gone to a little bit of a hiatus here in Hollywood because of various reasons – the strikes and now the fires,” she says. “I’ve got three films set to go, in pre-production, but we don’t have definite start dates yet. I’ve been very lucky. I’ve gone mostly from one project to another – a lot of TV as well as movies.”

While there has been another test of her love for her new home – more on that later – Weaver has had a lot going on since she returned.

Her most recent Australian film, Adam Elliot’s Memoir of a Snail, has been nominated for best animated feature film at the Oscars next month. She plays eccentric Pinky, who becomes a life-changing mentor to struggling Grace (Sarah Snook).

“He’s just so clever, totally unique, and such a sweet man,” she says of Elliot. “It’s got some pretty stiff competition but it’s already got legs – it’s won a few things already.”

Then at the Australian Academy of Cinema and Television Arts Awards earlier this month, Weaver won best supporting actress for the film – a first for both her and Snook, who won best actress, given voice performances are not usually recognised at mainstream awards.

Weaver delivered a typically warm and funny speech via video which closed with the declaration that, unlike Pinky, “I never slept with John Denver”. It became a running gag at the awards, with Robbie Williams later declaring that he had slept with John Denver “and he was a shit lay”.

During a colourful career over more than 60 years - with five marriages and numerous other relationships detailed in her 2005 memoir, Much Love, Jac - Weaver has lived a life of boldness and creativity. “I’ve often been called an adventuress and it’s fair to say that’s true,” she says.

Jacki Weaver speaks via video after being presented with the best supporting actress award by actor Henry Cavill at this year’s AACTAs.Credit: Getty Images for AFI

With a father, Art, who was war hero pilot turned barrister, and a strong-willed mother, Ede, who put her on diets from an early age and sent her to elocution lessons, Weaver was an imaginative child growing up in Sydney’s Hurstville.

At the age of four, she was reciting passages from Jonathan Swift and reading the Sunday paper. By five, she was pretending to be Italian to the local greengrocer, French to the cobbler, and northern English to the newsagent. She wrote that when was nine, her elocution teacher described her as “born to act”, to which her mother responded “Oh my god, no!”

While that sounds discouraging, Weaver says Ede always insisted that “anything boys can do, you can do, which was kind of laughable when you look at the fact that I’m 49 kilos and four feet eleven inches (150 centimetres) tall.

Pinky, voiced by Jacki Weaver, in Adam Elliot’s Oscar-nominated Memoir of a Snail.Credit: Madman

“I can’t take out the garbage or reach the overhead locker in an aircraft. But she was ahead of her time in that she was a feminist. She strongly believed in the equality of women.”

Her parents were fine with Weaver starting to act professionally as a 15-year-old, playing Cinderella on stage at Sydney’s Phillip Theatre in 1962. The 18-year-old pop star who played Prince Charming, Bryan Davies, quickly became her boyfriend and would pick her up from Hornsby Girls High School in his red Jaguar.

By the time she was in her 20s, Weaver was a household name from regular appearances on TV including the weekly ABC panel show Would You Believe?, in newspapers (with headlines like “TV star to wed” and “Mini skirt wedding!”) and in magazines (“My break with Jacki: Bryan Davies tells”).

With the Australian creative arts bursting to life in the 1970s, Weaver appeared in the films Stork, Alvin Purple, Petersen, The Removalists, Picnic at Hanging Rock, Caddie, and the wrenching Film Australia telemovie Do I Have to Kill My Child? On stage, she mixed performances in Shakespeare and Chekhov with Williamson and Buzo.

That background makes her the perfect host for her latest project, the three-part SBS documentary series Australia: An Unofficial History that uses Film Australia archival footage to explore how much the country changed in that tumultuous decade.

Filmmaker Phil Noyce, comedian Zoe Coombs Marr, Indigenous activist Gary Foley and others are interviewed about old films that sometimes seem charmingly comical, other times startlingly ugly.

“This is a story of the ’70s you’ve never seen before,” Weaver says in episode one. “The decade when Australia erupted in an explosion of social and political change.”

Australia went from British immigration being encouraged with films that emphasised the sunny climate and beach lifestyle to an era of multiculturalism with a stronger sense of the country’s strengths and uniqueness.

Jacki Weaver and Joel Edgerton in Animal Kingdom.

Weaver, who jokes that watching some of the Film Australia clips makes her wonder how she had a career at the time, originally thought she was just going to narrate the series.

“But they happened to catch me when I was in Sydney for a short visit and I did all those interviews [about her own films], which were not only exhausting, they were a bit too close to the bone for me,” she says. “I thought, I don’t know what I’ve let myself in for. But I think anyone who’s slightly interested in history and sociology would find them fascinating.”

So, did the past seem like a foreign country, as the famous saying goes, when Weaver watched those old films?

“It feels like we’ve gone backwards in some ways,” she says. “My generation, the Boomers, we’re a bit on the nose with the younger generation. I think it was ever thus: the younger generation always think they know more than the older generation. But in some ways, we’ve come a long way and in other ways we’ve gone backwards.”

While the movements for Indigenous, women’s and gay rights brought new freedoms in Australia, the old films feature moments of bitter racism, youths boasting about “poofter bashing” and young mothers routinely being prescribed Valium by their doctors.

Weaver, who read Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch young, describes herself as a feminist and supporter of gay rights in the ’70s.

“Even though I’m a straight woman, I have so many gay friends,” she says. “I remember when it was illegal to be gay and we all thought that was supremely unjust.”

But seeing a young overworked mother being prescribed Valium in a film called All in the Same Boat – and learning how widespread this was at the time – was a surprise.

“I don’t remember my mother ever needing medical help,” Weaver says. “I only saw her drunk once and that was the American next door neighbour who gave her two Martinis. I’ve only had Valium a couple of times when I had a bad back and I remember hating it. You can’t do the crossword because your mind goes strange.”

Weaver remembers her parents having heated arguments about Aboriginal children being taken from their parents. “It was a time when people thought they were doing them a favour, but my parents were strongly antipathetic towards that behaviour, which made them unusual,” she says. “A lot of people thought ‘the church is doing it so it’s good for them’ but it destroyed a couple of generations. It was a dreadful, dreadful thing to do.”

Jacki Weaver with Ed O’Neill and Cleopatra Coleman in the series Clipped, based on the NBA’s Donald Sterling scandal.Credit: Kelsey McNeal/FX

Weaver’s American career after she played the malicious “Smurf” Cody, matriarch of a crime family in Animal Kingdom, was a surprise. She was quickly offered 13 films and took to signing emails first “bewildered of Darlinghurst” then, when she received an Oscar nomination, “Stunned mullet of Kings Cross”.

“You’re the first person that ever told me that I’d get an Oscar nomination,” she says, remembering an interview we did in this masthead’s office cafeteria in Pyrmont. “I thought you were joking and I laughed. ”

Weaver’s second Oscar nomination came two years later for playing the daffy and warm-hearted mother of a former psychiatric patient (Bradley Cooper) in Silver Linings Playbook. Weaver has since shown that same range in everything from frothy comedies to thrillers, dramas, horror films and a Western. Her projects have included Yellowstone and Clipped on TV, and the movies The Five-Year Engagement, Stoker, Magic in the Moonlight, The Disaster Artist, Widows, Bird Box, Poms, The Grudge and Father Stu.

“I’m still a stunned mullet,” she says. “I should stress that I was perfectly happy with the way things were going for me. I was never really out of work much in Australia. I’ve been in more than 70 plays and I started in 1962 so it’s been a fairly solid career with very few dry patches.”

Returning regularly to Australia since moving to Los Angeles, Weaver has acted in Squinters, Secret City and Bloom on TV and the films Last Cab To Darwin, Goldstone, Never Too Late and Penguin Bloom. Before Christmas, she joined Judy Davis and Miriam Margolyes in playing nuns on a road trip in the New Zealand drama Holy Days.

While brought up to believe “it’s our duty to be cheerful”, Weaver is troubled by the rise of President Donald Trump.

Actors Jacki Weaver and Robert De Niro in Silver Linings Playbook.

“I don’t really want to talk about politics because I might get obscene but anyone who knows me knows that all my life I’ve been a lefty,” she says. “I think it’s a terrible thing for the country.”

But Weaver will get on with her still-thriving career regardless. “Now and again, I think I’d like to retire,” she says. “But as soon as I get another project, I get excited and can’t wait to do it.”

Australia: An Unofficial History screens weekly SBS and SBS On Demand from March 5.

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